Glenn Coats

Trick of the Light

July heat
the bend
in playing cards

School is out for the summer and the man with all the trout has set up a swimming pool on the Food Fair parking lot. I pay the guy a few bucks and he hands me a fishing pole with a length of string tied to the tip and an artificial fly attached to the end.

I join a circle of children who are dancing the flies like puppets in the water. Rainbow trout are swimming in the clear water but they are not biting on the flies. “He feeds them fish pellets,” one boy says. “They ain’t hungry.”

The man warns us not to put bait on the hooks. “No bread balls, no salmon eggs,” he says as his eyes follow our futile movements.

He sweet talks the pretty mothers who arrive with their little kids, acts so nice and stops watching us. One of those boys from the Roosevelt School (skinny with curly hair, dark skin) reaches in the water like a bear and snatches a fish. He hooks the fly through its lips and slips the trout back in the pool.

“I got one,” he cries. His pole bends like a back against the sun.

bubbles of tar
nothing left
for a soda